Two diametrically opposed factions in the Republican Id: the supporters of Sleepy McSleepums (aka Ben Carson), who is like a shot of morphine straight into the cerebellum. And the supporters of Donald Trump, who needs no alias because he is the most stimulating form of political snuff available without a prescription.
The former faction suffers from ataxia and dysphasia, for which the good neurosurgeon represents both ailment and cure. For normative clumsiness, he promises a form of political lassitude. He is a calming myelin sheath for the frayed nerves—and erratic impulses—of the GOP right-matter. By making them a bedtime story told in sleepy voice, he can reduce the chance that his dark political prophetics will keep you up at night.
The latter faction will wake you up in the morning. It’s not that it knows what it wants, precisely. But it does know generally that otherness must be expelled. This means not just a policy in favor of deporting and walling off illegal immigrants, but a representative whose arrogance is a way of making sure that no ego-deflating truths disembark on his own rocky shores, and functions by deporting words that give voice to every impulse that happens to come to his attention. Where Carson promises to insulate, to keep everything in, Trump promises to keep—and allow—everything out. Where Carson’s faction seems to want a containment system around the negative, Trump’s seems to desire a pure and indeterminate negativity that obliterates—er, trumps—everything in its path.
If you were to bring these factions together—if you were to fuse them—you would have created a monster that is too functional, too mobile, and too articulate to be political.
–Wes Alwan
You have stolen all snarky wit left in the world, compressed it into a terse blast of critique, and raised the bar for pithy political analysis. I like.
Do the Dems, dare ya.
How’s this?
On Drinking the Lefty Kool-Tea
Two diametrically opposed factions with the Democratic Id: Supporters of the Grand Kvetchbah, Bernie Sanders, and supporters of ooh-ooh-look-at-me-pick-me! (aka Hillary Clinton).
The former faction, to which I belong, has several layers of granola standing between us and political reality. The word “socialist” does not scare us the way it scares Middle America, because we know socialism as something we do in your spare time, with slogans atop pickets and hashtags. Certain things “matter,” certain things you must “occupy,” and everything else is absolutely taboo. Bernie is the Jewish Uncle we never had but always wanted to add to our cache of cachet-conferring minority acquaintances. We believe America just may vote for Bernie, because we’re are almost entirely unaware of the white people who didn’t go to one of our small and all-white-but-minority-obsessed liberal arts schools, except to the extent that we are outraged by the brutality of the only truly diverse and integrated institutions in the United States, the fascist pests who keep the intra-mural murder rate at a manageable 14,000 per annum and those who operate the great wall of military machinery that keeps our lattes warm.
The latter faction embraces political reality in the way that necrophiliacs must say to themselves, “hey, that lifeless and rotting thing is cute!” Which is not to say that they don’t have cynical aspirations. They swoon over the notion that the first female president may follow America’s first black president, although they also suspect she’s the only one who has the balls to get anything done. After eight years of hopey-changey, they want la femme fait-oui. Where Bernie supporters have actual principles, Hillary supporters could imagine themselves cozening up to another quest for mythical weapons of mass destruction – and sign away the souls of their mothers to the devil to boot – just for a glimpse of someone with a vagina walking down a West Wing hallway with subordinate male advisors in tow, part of her powerful womanly wake.
If you were to bring these factions together – if you were to fuse them – you would have created … Leon Wieseltier (seriously, google image him).
Well that’s pretty clever and I didn’t have to double dog dare you, thankfully. You could’ve made fun of the Blacks some.
Thank you Wes!